Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Marketing
Skills:
GlaxoSmithKline fined $3bn after bribing doctors to increase the
unauthorized prescription of antidepressants Paxil and Wellbutrin to
children and to conceal safety problems with the asthma treatment
Advair. It is not research that drives the high price of drugs, but
the need to build reserves against being caught.

Quoted:
“Domestic police have devolved into criminal gangs of liars, thugs
and assassins. Hostile to the public they serve and the laws they are
supposed to uphold.”

Confidential
Informant:
UBS, which ratted out its co-conspirators in the LIBOR fraud
investigation, is reported to be cooperating with Swiss authorities
in an anti-trust investigation into manipulation of the prices for
precious metals. UBS has entered a plea agreement that will let it
off with a much lighter fine and no criminal convictions.

Seems
Like Old Times:
A Saudi air strike in Yemen “apparently by mistake” hit a
wedding party, killing at least 130 non-combatants.

Blow
Some My Way: A
national multicenter study by McGill University Health Center
concluded that there is “no evidence of harmful effects on
cognitive function, or blood tests among cannabis consumers and we
observed a significant improvement in their levels of pain, symptom
distress, mood and quality of life"

Seems
Like Old Times, Part II:
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now are allowing borrowers to count the
income of their live-with children or parents to get mortgages that
they cannot afford.

Professionals: House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (Orphan-UT)
opened the Republican witch hunt of Planned Parenthood by blaming its
funding for his parents death from
cancer. Then Jim
Jordan (Grand Inquisitor-OH) interrupted Planned Parenthood's
president 19 times in 5 minutes, mostly by repeating the same
question.

Never-Neverland:
If all the promises made by all the nations of the world to cut
carbon emissions are kept, the Earth will only heat up another 6°
Fahrenheit – which will be enough to produce catastrophic famine
and widespread extinction of plants and animals. Whatever feel-good
agreement is made in Paris this December will not do the job, because
businesses and the rich think that it will cost them money.

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

We'll
Be Back! Maybe:
After pouring over $7 billion down a disappointing hole in the
Chukchi Sea, Shell has ceased exploration activity in offshore Alaska
“for the foreseable future.” Seems the cornucopia didn't
cornucooperate.

Me
Too:
Audi says that they installed “cheat” emissions software in over
2.1 million of their cars. Some (just
some?)
BMW, Mercedes and Peugot cars actually use
at least 50% more fuel than their
EPA claims.

Chastity
Belts?Appearing
on FOX, Seton
Motley, president of Less Government, said
that instead of raising the minimum wage, the best way to keep people
off of welfare was to stop low wage workers from having children.
“The problem is a family of three is not supposed to be living on a
minimum wage. “If you’re making minimum wage, you shouldn’t be
having children and trying to raise a family on it.”
In North Carolina the GOP-controlled Senate passed a bill that
would limit food stamp benefits to three months for most unemployed
adults without children, because that would encourage them to finish
college.

File
& Forget:
An investigation by the Missouri Attorney General found “no
evidence” that Planned Parenthood mishandled any fetal tissue.

His
Story:
In South Dakota the Board of Education has decided that public school
students, from Kindergarten to High School, need not be bothered
with learning about the Constitution, slavery, the slaughter of
American Indians or any of that stuff that tarnishes our history.

Playing
To Their Publics:The
Irving,
TX chief of police and the
mayor claim that nothing about the arrest of Ahmed Mohamed for
building a clock was wrong, and that “he got what he asked for.”

Our
Kentucky Home:
Kim is not the only one; two other Kentucky county clerks claim God
has told them to refuse to grant marriage licenses to same-sex
couples but have not been in trouble with the courts simply because
no gays have applied to their offices. And they'd like it to stay
that way.

Pig/Poke:
After originally refusing to dignify Lord Ashcroft's story about
Cameron and The Pig with a response, PM David Cameron now
specifically denies that it was the dead pig's mouth that he put his
“private part” in. He also claimed that he was too busy to sue
Ashcroft for hamming things up.

Fish
In A Barrel:
Swiss authorities have opened an investigation into whether banks
have been illegally fixing precious metals prices.

Mission
Accomplished:
Walmart's customers do not like the long lines at checkout, the lack
of customer service, the shoddy goods, the below-average produce and
the wobbly-wheeled carts. In other words, they
don't like Walmart except for the price. They'll be back.

Monday, September 28, 2015

Battered
Up:
Having deposed Boehner, the uber-conservatives seem likely to next
turn to removing Mitch
McConnell from his Senate leadership. Their complaint is that he has
not taken advantage of the GOP majority to neuter the Democrats by
eliminating the use of filibusters.

A
Grateful Nation:
An 11-year Special Forces holder of the Bronze Star for Valor has
been kicked out of the US Army for “shoving a local [Afghan]
commander who was keeping a 12-year-old boy chained to a bed as his
sex slave. This was construed to be “a flagrant departure from
professionalism and even-tempered leadership” by senior Army
commanders
who have long sense lost any sense of decency.

New
Thinking. New Possibilities:
An uncorrectable manufacturing problem has caused Hyundai to recall
nearly half a million of its midsize cars to replace their defective
engines.

Second
Act:
The second group of US-trained Syrian “moderate” rebels have
given much of their weaponry and transport to the local Al Qaeda
affiliate immediately
on crossing into Syria .
The $5oo million program has been a complete failure, like
so many US undertakings in the Middle East.

Carramba!
Jeb! says
he
will do what his
brother did, except this time it will work.

Up
The River:
The Pine River
in Michigan has so much farm-runoff-caused
E. coli in it that residents are being warned to not even touch the
water. Over
in Flint, Michigan the drinking water contains so much lead that
seniors, children and pregnant women have been told not to drink it.
A
chicken producer in Mississippi is recalling half a million
pounds of chicken that may be contaminated with “extraneous metal
materials”. As opposed to acceptable metal materials.

Barefoot
& Pregnant:Marco
Rubio says that women are either too dumb to be trusted to make
abortion decisions for themselves, or they get pregnant so they can
sell their fetus at Planned Parenthood which “created
an industry … an incentive for people not just to look forward to
having more abortions, but being able to sell that fetal tissue...”

Usual
Suspects:
Police in Kansas City are using computer algorithms to identify
potential criminals before they commit crimes – and then telling
the suspects that the cops are watching them. The idea is to prevent
future crime through intimidation and harassment, although that's not
the way the chief explains it.

Ordered
In The Court:
The judge in a Texas murder trial has had a “shock belt” placed
on the defendant to encourage him to stop “misbehaving” during
his trail. In that he is facing the death penalty, a few electric
shocks may not have the deterrent value the judge is seeking.

Saying
No To No:
In Australia, 70% of the voters oppose the plan by the Tony Abbot
government – wholly owned and operated by environmental rapists and
climate change deniers – to strip environmental groups of their
charity status.

Dumb
& Dumber:“George W. Bush's central plan for selling his 2001 tax cut,
both as a candidate and then later as president, was to lie about
both its cost and its beneficiaries. Jeb Bush's central premise for
his own tax cut proposal seems to be the same.”

Your
Money Or Your Life:
Alexion Pharmaceuticals, a US drug company that has only one
product, Soliris, is suing s Canada for trying to lower its
$700K-a-year cost. Alexion has made $6 billion in profit from the
drug in the last eight years. The drug treats, but does not cure, two
rare and lethal diseases of the blood. Patients must take the drug
for life. This sort of thing will become common once TPP is in
force.

High
There!
“Dry” counties in Kentucky have significantly worse problems with
meth than places where alcohol
is legally available.

Saturday, September 26, 2015

Perils
Of Pauline: John Boehner's resignation as Speaker may prevent a government
shutdown in October, but nearly guarantees a shutdown in mid-December
by a newly empowered Tea Party wing of the GOP that is already
celebrating their victory. The struggle for control of the Majority
Party has simply entered a new phase, with the farer right trying to
gain control over the totally anti-government farthest right. The
first round seems to be between Paul Ryan (who says
he doesn't want the job), the establishment's candidate,
Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (who has the
same problems that caused Boehner's resignation) and some
yahoo from the Tea Party.

Good
Neighbors: Not
only do 41% of Americans want a wall
along the nation's border with Mexico, 41% want one along the border
with Canada. There's a good likelihood these
are the same 41%'s.

Each
And Every: For
the last seven years, the UK's Government Communications Headquarters
– GCHQ, NSA's little brother – has recorded everything that every
internet user does online. GCHQ
builds profiles of users, analyzes their emails, Skype calls, text
and instant messenger communications, and tracks cell phone locations
and social media connections.

Going
Through The Motions:
If your “antibacterial” soap contains triclosan – which most
do – you might as well save your money and use ordinary soap.

Just
Say'n: The
last time the Republicans shut down the government over budgets, it
cost us $2 billion in
additional outlays.
Let's
hope (against the prevailing evidence) they learned something.

Local
Yokels: A
Republican state legislator in Maine wants to post the names and
addresses of welfare recipients online, and a similarly handicapped
fellow in
the Kentucky legislature says the state's $1,000 at a time limit
on bribes infringes on the First and Fourteenth Amendment rights of
both himself and various lobbyists.

Noted:
Homelessness in the UK has increased 40%
since David
Cameron became Prime
Minister.

Nine
Tenths:VW’s
massive and prolonged
evasion of US regulatory oversight is just the tip of the iceberg.
It seems probabe that VW and most of its competitors in Europe –
where half the cars are diesels - have also been gaming European
standards. Previous reports suggest that US manufacturers have also
gamed the system. More, and worse, to come.

Truth
To Power: Any
attempt to address global climate change that does not address the
unsustainable number of humans on the planet will
fail.

Idle
Hands: Scott
Walker, fresh from failing to get the government job he wanted, is
following up on his success in using budget cuts to turn Wisconsin's
Office of State Employment Relations into the new
Office of State
Employment Management
headed by a political hack of the governor's choosing, now wants to
dispense with merit hiring based on civil service exams and have
state jobs filled by a patronage system.

Evidence:
The capitalists have once again demonstrated their willingness to
kill us for profit – using cars, drugs, petroleum, and even peanut
butter. Are you sure this is the best of all possible worlds?

Thursday, September 24, 2015

How
much you pay in taxes is irrelevant, how much you have left is what
matters.

Capitalism's
Triumphs: In at least 5 states persons on bail must wear
electronic monitoring bracelets – and pay for them. About $3100 a
month. On any given day there are at least 100,000 people wearing
ankle bracelets. That's over $1 billion a year in mostly pure
profit. We're all aghast that a little snot has legally hiked the
price of staying alive from $13 a pill to $750 – but it is the
essence of capitalism to charge
as much as possible for one's product or service. And we are
shocked to our very core to discover that the capitalists at
Volkswagen have been gaming
regulations (for years and with the apparent knowledge and
consent of the German government) for fun and profit while
killing tens of thousandsindirectly
– the equivalent of collateral damage. Note that VW was first
caught doing this back
in 1974, the same year that GM was forced to recall more than
800,000 cars because it was doing the same thing.

Unfortunately:
“Wealth inequality has widened along racial, ethnic lines since
end of Great Recession.”

People/Profits:
Tennessee is arguing that the FCC cannot violate “states rights”
by letting cities provide fast, inexpensive broadband services as
long as corporations providing slow and expensive service continue to
pay politicians for the privilege of overcharging the citizens for
indifferent service.

Quoted:
“When you see ever-changing rationales for never-changing policy
demands, it’s a good bet that there’s an ulterior motive.” Paul
Krugman

Explicate:
David Cameron says Europe must get better at “sending migrants
home”.

A
Regular Guy: Jeb ¡Caramba! Bush now pledges to gut the FCC's
net neutrality rules and return unconscionable profits to ATT,
Comcast, Charter and friends. He also says he will roll back
environmental protections, limits on Wall Street fraud, limits on oil
drilling and saftey regulations that hurt profits of oil companies,
as well as killing food-safety rules that are harming profits while
preventing the food industry from killing us. Because regulations
that hamper profits while protecting our health are unconstitutional.
Or some such bullshit.

Shadow
Boxing: A mathematician who is trying to account for anomalies
in Kansas voting patterns is being denied access to the records which
might reveal the causes of these anomalies. “Anomaly” here is
taken to mean “how the Republicans got a lot more votes than seems
possible.”

Quoted:
“There is absolutely no evidence to support the statement that
we're the greatest country in the world. We're seventh in literacy,
twenty-seventh in math, twenty-second in science, forty-ninth in life
expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, third in median household
income, number four in labor force, and number four in exports. We
lead the world in only three categories: number of incarcerated
citizens per capita, number of adults who believe angels are real,
and defense spending, where we spend more than the next twenty-six
countries combined, twenty-five of whom are allies.” The
Newsroom.

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Multiple
Answers: 1)
VW's CEO was shocked to learn they'd been caught. 2) The renegade
low-level coder responsible will be fired. 3) The CEO will be
spending more time with his family. And 4) No one will go to jail.

Calling
Ms. Nightingale:
The Seattle Children's Hospital has told 12,000
families that their
children need blood tests to see if the hospital managed to infect
them with HIV, Hep B & C or lesser infections. Seems that
“procedures for sterilizing surgical instruments were
not always followed.”

Vengeance:
The SEC has successfully
concluded its case against two former Fannie Mae executives who,
behind their bosses' carefully turned backs, committed
multiple instances of criminal fraud
“misled investors” about $100 billion in sub-prime loans. The
culprits will be fined $35,000... and not go to jail. They also
charged then CEO (who got the job when his predecessor was caught
fiddling the books) andthe two
underlings haveagreed
to
rat outtheir
former boss,
Chief Executive Daniel
Mudd..
A similar suit against folks at Freddie Mac netted a fine of
$310,000.

Money
Matters: Men
at the bottom 20% of the income scale who turned 50 in 1980 had a 27%
chance of living to 85, as did those born 30 years later. But the
odds for those in the top 20% of the income scale jumped from 45% to
66%.

Conform:
A pre-school teacher in the Okemah, OK public school system was
forcing a naturally left-handed 4 year old to write with his right
hand because “being left-handed is evil”.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Off
Tracks: Again
this month Caterpillar's retail sales are down throughout the world –
which makes 33 consecutive months of contraction. There's a message
in there – either someone's stealing their heavy equipment business
or no one's in the “needing heavy equipment' business. I pick door
#2.

Qualifications:
Mega
accounting firm Ernst & Young, which has previously been one of
the UK's largest recruiters of college graduates, says that their
years of experience with graduate associates has taught them that
there is “no evidence” that a college degree is a pre-requisite
for success in life, so
they will no longer
seek nor require college degrees in its hiring practices.

Protecting
& Serving:
A cop in Miami
handcuffed a kid and put him in a squad care following an altercation
at school... over a toy. The suspect is five.

The
Company Store:
Governments are examining ways to do away with physical currency and
replace it with contactless
credit/debit
cards. Once “money”
exists only as electronic digits in government monitored bank
accounts, they will own us completely. Buy and bury some precious
metals, just in case.

The
Price Is Right:
Martin Shkreli, the hedge fund slime charging $750 a pill for a
60-year old drug that sold for $13 a tab before he got his greedy
hands on the rights, says that the drug is worth a lot more than $750
because people really, really need it to survive. Your money or your
life. Or first the one and then the other – asked if he would
consider lowering the price for those who couldn't afford it, Shkreli
simply said “No.”

Crazies:
Billy Graham's kid, Franklin Graham, says that the President will
have the “blood of children” on his hands if he doesn't kill
Planned Parenthood's federal funding. Some GOPers
in MI claim Planned Parenthood encourages teens to get pregnant
so the group can make money performing abortions. House
Republicans arelikely
to
shut down the federal government to make sure everyone knows they
don't like providing healthcare services to women. Best of all is
Carley Fiorina who insists
that you watch a non-existent video of things that never happened
before you can talk to her about the things that didn't happen.

Crime
Fighter:
Pennsylvania's Supremes have suspended PA Attorney General Kathleen
Kane's law license
while she defends herself against felony charges. How can she
continue as the state's top lawyer if she can't practice law?

Condensed
Version: It
comes as no surprise that the US is unsure which terrorists to back –
which explains the nation's penchant for creating their own.

Monday, September 21, 2015

Bought
And Paid For:
Saudi Arabia will chair “a panel of independent experts” on the
UN Human Rights Council. Saudi expertise in the area of human rights
comes solely from their long and bloody history of repressing them.
Only bribery or blackmail could possibly explain such an astonishing
insult to common decency.

Yes,
But: Secretary
Kerry says that the US will increase the number of refugees admitted
to the country to 85,000 in 2016 and 100,000 in 2017. Wait and see
what the GOPers say.

Parallel
Universes: The
Democratic wannabes talk about college costs, climate change,
workplace equality for women, addressing income inequality, improving
healthcare for all and expanding gay rights. The Other Guys talk
about abortion, bombing all and sundry, increased military spending,
lower taxes for the rich, rounding up immigrants and building a wall
along the Canadian border. Reality check: Voters mostly vote based
on how they personally perceive the economy.

Bastards:
Turing Pharmaceuticals bought the rights to market the 1950's drug
Daraprim and overnight raised its price from $13.50 a pill to $750
each. No new nothing, except price.

German
Engineering:
Engineers at Volkswagen designed software for VW diesels that gave
false readings on emissions tests. The EPA is not amused and wants
$18 billion in penalties and all 500,000 of the cars recalled and
repaired to conform to the emission standards laws.

Factoid:
The typical man in the US, assuming he has a job at all, earns less
today than he did in 1973.

Times,
Changing Yet Some More:
President Obama has nominated Eric
Fanning, formerly an advisor to the Secretary of Defense, acting
under-secretary of the army, previously the undersecretary of the Air
Force, deputy under-secretary of the Navy, and a long time openly gay
citizen. Guess what the Republicans would like to focus on in his
confirmation hearings...

Shoe,
Dropping:
After several months, authorities in Waco are finally acknowledging
that law enforcement officers shot at least 12 rounds into the
assembled bikers at the Twin Peaks restaurant. So far they have not
identified who the cops shot or whether the shots were fatal. Stay
tuned – we'll be shocked, of course, to learn that all of the dead
were victims of a police riot.

Per
Capita: The
British Secret Police are paying Muslims in Great Britain to rat out
their co-religionists. It was that sort of pay for play that led to
Afghans naming people they didn't like to the Americans, who forked
over cash while filling up the American torture gulag with mostly
innocent bystanders.

Child's
Play: A NC
teen is being prosecuted as an adult, charged with 5 felony sex
offenses for having nude photos of himself on his phone. It seems he
was exploiting himself. He was apparently caught during an
warrantless search of his cell phone and will not be labled a sex
offender for life. Avoid North Carolina if at all possible.

Dumb
& Dumber:Two
Republican backwoodsmen think they have the power to exempt
Tennessee from following the Supreme Court decision on marriage
equality by declaring that "Any court decision purporting to
strike down natural marriage, including (a recent U.S. Supreme Court
decision), is unauthoritative, void, and of no effect." Their
cousins on the Alabama Supreme Court want
their 12 minutes of fame for ruling that Alabama does not have to
recognize adoptions made in Georgia, because lesbians... What part
of “equal rights” and “Supreme Court” don't these folks
grasp?

Saturday, September 19, 2015

Relax:
GlaxoSmithKline, which was fined $3 billion for fraudulently
promoting several of its drugs, has known
for over 15 years that its antidepressant drug Paxil is neither safe
nor effective when given to adolescents and has withheld this
information while pushing the drug's use. The fine will undoubtedly
be some small fraction of the profits they made selling a drug that
caused suicidal thoughts in nearly 15% of of the adolescents given
it.

On
Immigration:
Either we believe in our founding principles, or we should give up
the pretense.

Yellen,
Passing The Graveyard:
“Let
me be clear that negative interest rates was not something that we
considered very seriously... at all... today.” Today.
Stay
tuned.

Bigger
Brother:Swiss
health insurers are developing a plan to require their clients to
wear digital health and fitness monitoring devices so they could
charge higher premiums to sedentary couch potatoes.

Odds
On:
Nearly 3,000 of the 440,000 refugees who have attempted
to cross the Mediterranean
this year have drowned. That's a 0.6% death rate, which may beat the
odds if you own
a GM vehicle.

Readin':Children
in
countries
where the
kids
are “most comfortable with computers”, have
much poorer reading skills that in countries not quite so addicted to
the tiny sceen.The
more children use computers at school, the lower
their reading skills. And
cutting-and-pasting isn't writing, either.

What
Could Go Wrong?Japan
has
changed
its constitution to
allow Japanese troops to fight
abroad after
70 years of repressed
aggression
official pacifism.

Quote/Note:Our
perception of how we are doing economically
is based on how the Jones are doing. Not the 1% Jones. Not even the
10% Jones, but the Jones in our group. It is not the actual level of
increase or decrease in our wages that matter, but whether we're
doing as well or better than the neighbors. As for the 10%, we we
wish them well because we deeply believe that we'll get there one day
soon.

Second
Chances: The
Catholic Church continues to ship US and European priests who
sexually abuse children to South America, instead of jail.

This
Is Only A Test:
A military coup lin
Burkina Faso, ed
by the country's former spy chief, has overthrown the
countrydemocratic
government.
Your task: find Burkina Faso on a map. Hint: it's
in Africa.

If
Only: The
Supreme Court has banned all
corporate contributions
to individual political
campaigns and to
political parties.
That's Brazil's Supreme
Court, not ours.

Another
Verse: So far
this year over half a
million children have fled attacks by the Islamist group Boko Haram.
Maybe we need to
rethink a whole lot of things.

Tradition:
A seventeen year old Saudi convicted of protesting against the
government will be crucified. This does not seem to be an
improvement over the more traditional beheading.

Food
For Thought:
August 2015 was the hottest August on record (as were the three
previous months). It has been 100 years since a month – any month
- set the record for being cold.

Friday, September 18, 2015

They
Ain't Seen Nothing Yet:
Sure, Europe is overwhelmed with the tens of thousands of desperate
migrants fleeing hunger and violence in Africa and the Middle East ,
but this is just the beginning. As global warming continues and
continues to worsen, the violence and the hunger will only grow, as
will the waves of migrants. Over the next couple of decades the
numbers will not be tens or hundreds of thousands, but millions,
perhaps tens of millions. Europe best get ready. So should the
United States, because things to our south are not going to get any
better either.

Plan
B:
After two months of investigation, Republicans in the House have
concluded that Planned Parenthood did not sell fetal tissue for
profit, did not break any law, and did not misuse any federal funds.
They also concluded that they would have to defund Planned Parenthood
because
they still don't like it.

Not
Invented Here:
Not only did the US reject repeated offers by Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya and Syria to surrender in favor of continued combat, it also
rejected a
2012 offer by Russia to help get rid of Assad and avert the
ongoing civil war and the rise of ISIS.

Just
Saying No: The
Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees both Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac, wants to raise their CEOs' pay from $600,000 a year to
$4 million – sso that they could eventually hire “reliable”
individuals to fill the positions. The Senate, bless 'em, said no.

Perspective:
The Wall Street Journal (and lots of me-toers) are all hot an
bothered that that raving socialist Bernie Sanders want to spend $18
trillion over 10 years on a single-payer universal healthcare plan
for all Americans. What they fail to mention is that we already
spend $1.4 trillion a year, don't cover everyone and get pretty
mediocre health care for the money – while driving up the cost of
employment and lowering our competitiveness with countries that
already have single payer systems, which is most of our trading
partners. But there seems to be something wrong with actually
getting what we're paying for if there aren't profits in it for
private insurance companies and for-profit healthcare companies.

Revised
Revisions: The
US Air Force Chief of Staff says that acting on the F-35's continued
inability to meet contract specifications – such as being able to
fly, or to shoot its guns, or drop ordinance – by reducing the
number the Air Force will buy would damage the program just when it
looks like it might someday become operational. Plus it would cut
into foreign sales of the turkey.

Just
Bidness: Carly
Fiornia, more than a little misleadingly, cites her time at Hewlett
Packard as her prime qualification to be President. One
of the worst CEOs ever., she “destroyed half the wealth of her
investors” and still took home nearly $100 million.

Over-reaction
Are Us:
The idiocy in Irving over a homemade clock begins to be
understandable (not excusable, mind you) when you learn that a couple
of years ago they reacted to a chain email that warned of a Muslim
takeover of the schools' curriculum by hiring a former social studies
teacher to produce a report that concluded the curriculum is heavily
biased in favor of Christianity.

And
The
Band
Played
On:The
Census Bureau reports that there was no improvement in wages during
2014, no increase in the median household income and no decrease in
the number of Americans living in poverty. Income was, in fact, 6.5%
lower than it was in 2007 before all this recovery took place. It's
the
new normal of low official unemployment, high real unemployment,
low wages and little inflation. But we're doing just fine, depending
how you define “we” and “fine”.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

Taking
Notes: The US
should pay close attention to the way Europe wrestles with their
immigration problems, because our
own are just getting started. Well, in the sense that we mostly
created the problem it should be called “our refugee problem”,
but it is taking place over there. Refugee camps are being planned
for Italy and Greece (!). Germany, which has made to most accepting
statements is threatening to cut funding to those EU states that do
not accept their quota of refugees. At the same time, though, the European
Court of Justice ruled that Germany can deny basic welfare
payments to migrants - even if they've previously worked
in the country.

Another
Record: US
household incomes are back to 1989 levels and 46.7 million Americans
now live in poverty. They will not benefit from Bush's tax cuts, but
will suffer from his planned cuts in the social safety nets.

Privateers:
The Senate's version of the highway bill includes a quite little
provision that requires the Treasury Department to privatize the
collection of back taxes. Tax collection is the
signature government activity, so of course the Rs want to privatize
it.

Poked:
Australia has
decided that parents who do not vaccinate their children may not
receive any government childcare benefits.

Success:
The US has so far spent $150 million training Syrian rebels to carry
on the fight against ISIS in Syria. The original plan was to train
5,400 a year. So far, of the 60 graduates of the program, only 4 or
5 survive and are still fighting in Syria. Only another 100 to 120
prospective fighters are still in training. D'ya think the program
was outsourced to one of our glorious mercenary companies.

Revised
Version: A
Christian commentator claims that Bernie Sanders' anit-poverty plan
is un-Christian because “the God of the Bible is not a socialist.”
Well, maybe the god of the Old Testament wasn't, but that Jesus
fellow in the New Testament was certainly a pinko.

Education:
A 14-year old 9th
grade student in
Irving, TX, assembled a digital clock from IC chip components as a
science project and took it to school. His science teacher was
impressed. His English teacher thought it was a bomb. Four Irving
cops arrived, arrested the student for terroristic activity and
hauled him off to jail. Once it was determined that he had not built
a bomb he was released and, because he was a Muslim he was suspended
from school for three days. Learning that young Ahmed Mohamed had a
few days off, President Obama
called and invited him to the White House.

Compassion: Mike-the-Christian
Huckabee says that the people we see on the nightly news streaming
out of bombed-out Syrian cities and Syrian villages run by ISIS are
not fleeing tyranny, they are “just looking for cable TV.”

Higher
Education:
Obama is getting beaten up for saying that college students should be
made to listen to points of view that are new to them, that may not
conform to their parents prejudices. That the point of an education
is... well, to become educated.

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Into
The Liars' Den:
Bernie Sanders gave a speech at Jerry Fallwell's Liberty University,
stressing the injustice of an America that does not feed its poor not
care for its sick. The
good little Christian
boys and girls didn't
want to hear about feeding the poor and caring for the sick, not
while gay Americans were marrying each
other and abortion was
still legal. Bernie was
polite enough not to shame them for caring more about fetuses than
hungry children.

Slackers:"If people on
disability were faking it, they wouldn’t have such high death
rates. People on disability are three to six times more likely to die
than people in their age group who are not on disability."

Teeter-Totter:
Debt levels around the globe have reached such precarious heights
that many fear even a small hike in US interest rates could begin an
avalanche of problems that could bring the whole edifice down.

On
Popular Democracy:
Polls show that 43% of Republicans think
believe that Obama is a Muslim, and 20% of adult Americans believe he
was born outside the country. These are the folks who
keep electing Mitch McConnell who says US businesses are being
held back because the unemployed are ““doing
too good with food stamps, Social Security and all the rest” to
look for work.

Rule
Britannia:
Seems that even in the Commonwealth nations such as Australia,
British tradition protects the well connected when they commit crimes
against children, while back home British police have dropped their
investigation murders committed by a VIP
Westminster pedophile ring. Down under, Robert
Emmett, son of an
Appellate judge and a Federal Circuit Court judge was permitted to
plead guilt to charges of “filming the private parts of children”
and possessing over 9,000 pornographic child abuse images on his
computer. In exchange for his plea he must do 32 hours of “community
service” each month for two years. Hopefully not in a youth
center.

God
Question: What
sort of country will we have when everyone gets to do only that part
of their job that fits with their reading of the Bible. Or Koran,
Kama Sutra, or the instructions to their microwave.

Our Motto

Keep fightin' for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.